Virtual Light

“Hey, Bu

“You know it. It’s regs.”

“It was late, you know?”

Bu

“Huh?”

“They wa

“Maybe ten minutes after I went in. Fifteen tops. Basement in there’s a rat-maze.”

“You went in 6:32:18” he said. “They got that when they sca

“Bu

“You didn’t go anywhere else? In the hotel?”

“Uh-uh” she said, and felt this fu

“I don’t think they’re worrying about the guy’s package” Bu

“So?”

“Lookit, Chev” he said, “security guy calls, that’s one thing. Sorry, boss, won’t let it happen again. But this was somebody up in the company, IntenSecure it’s called, and he called up Wilson direct.” Allied’s owner. “So I gotta make nice with Wilson and Mr. Security, I gotta have Grasso cover for me on the board and naturally he screws everything up…”

“Bu

“Hey. You’re sorry, I’m sorry, but there’s some big shit rentacop sitting behind a desk and he’s putting fucking Wilson through about what precisely did you do after you gave that lawyer his package. About what kind of employee are you exactly, how long you mess for Allied, any criminal record, any drug use, where you live.”

Chevette saw the asshole’s black glasses, right where she’d left them. In their case, behind Ski

“That ain’t normal” Bu

“You tell ’em where I live, Bu

“Out on the bridge” he said, then cracked her a little sliver of grin. “Not like you got much of an address, is it?” Now he spun himself around in the chair and began to shut the monitors down.

“Bu

“Come and find you.” His back to her. “Here. ”Cause they won’t know where else to go. You didn’t do anything, did you, Chevy?“ The back of his skull showing gray stubble.

Automatic. “No. No… Thanks, Bu

He grunted in reply, neutral, ending it, and Chevette was back in the corridor, her heart pounding under Ski

Worry was starting to penetrate Ringer’s rudimentary view of things. “Didn’t do nuthin to you, man.”

“Been carvin’ your name in elevators again, Ringer.”

“But I din’t do nuthin to you!”

“Cause and effect, mofo. We know it’s a tough concept for you, but try: you do shit, other shit follows. You go scratching your tag in the clients’ fancy elevators, we hassle you, man.” Sammy Sal spread the long brown fingers of his left hand across Ringer’s beat-to-shit helmet, palming it like a basketball, and twisted, lifting, the helmet’s strap digging into Ringer’s chin. “Din’t do nuthin!” Ringer gurgled.

Chevette ducked past them, heading for the bike-rack beneath the mural portrait of Shapely. Someone had shot him in his soulful martyr’s eye with a condomful of powder blue paint, blue ru

“Hey” Sammy Sal said, “come here and help me torment this shit-heel.”

She stuck her hand through the recognition-loop and tried to pull her handlebars out of the rack’s tangle of molybdenum steel, graphite, and aramid overwrap. The other bikes’ alarms all went off at once, a frantic chorus of ear-splitting bleats, basso digital sire

She saw Sammy Sal straddle his own bike, a pink and black-fleck fat-tube with Fluoro-Rimz that ran off a hubgenerator.

Sammy Sal was coming after her. She’d never wanted company less.

She took off.

Proj. Just proj.

Like her morning dream, but scarier.

12. Eye movement

Rydell looked at these two San Francisco cops, Svobodov and Orlovsky, and decided that working for Warbaby had a chance of being interesting. These guys were the real, the super-heavy thing. Homicide was colossus, any department anywhere.

And here he’d been in Northern California all of forty-eight minutes and he was sitting at a counter drinking coffee with Homicide. Except they were drinking tea. Hot tea. In glasses. Heavy on the sugar. Rydell was at the far end, on the other side of Freddie, who was drinking milk. Then Warbaby, with his hat still on, then Svobodov, then Orlovsky.

Svobodov was nearly as tall as Warbaby, but it all seemed to be sinew and big knobs of bone. He had long, pale hair, combed straight back from his rocky forehead, eyebrows to match, and skin that was tight and shiny, like he’d stood too long in front of a fire. Orlovsky was thin and dark, with a widow’s peak, lots of hair on the backs of his fingers, and those glasses that looked like they’d been sawn in half.

They both had that eye thing, the one that pi

Rydell had had a course in that at the Police Academy, but it hadn’t really taken. It was called Eye Movement Desensitization & Response, and was taught by this retired forensic psychologist named Bagley, from Duke University. Bagley’s lectures tended to wander off into stories about serial killers he’d processed at Duke, auto-erotic strangulation fatalities, stuff like that. It sure passed the time between High Profile Felony Stops and Firearms Training System Scenarios. But Rydell was usually kind of rattled after Felony Stops, because the instructors kept asking him to take the part of the felon. And he couldn’t figure out why. So he’d have trouble concentrating, in Eye Movement. And if he did manage to pick up anything useful from Bagley, a session of FATSS would usually make him forget it. FATSS was like doing Dream Walls, but with guns, real ones.

When FATSS tallied up your score, it would drag you right down the entrance wounds, your own or the other guy’s, and make the call on whether the loser had bled to death or copped to hydrostatic shock. There were people who went into full-blown post-traumatic heeb-jeebs after a couple of sessions on FATSS, but Rydell always came out of it with this shit-eating grin. It wasn’t that he was violent, or didn’t mind the sight of blood; it was just that it was such a rush. And it wasn’t real. So he never had learned to throw that official hoodoo on people with his eyes. But this Lt. Svobodov, he had the talent beaucoup, and his partner, Lt. Orlovsky, had his own version going, nearly as effective and he did it over the sawn-off tops of those glasses. Guy looked sort of like a werewolf anyway, which helped.